WHAT? WHY? HOW?

M Arch Report Abstract: SPATIAL LETTERS TO A PRISONER

The project explores the dynamic transformation and translation of a very established architectural product, the office, into a new space that fluctuates between different realities, by means of a narrative. It is an attempt to collide the dynamic construction of an identity in a multicultural society against the rigidly institutionalised architectural typologies by means of cultural productions such as novels, paintings, photographs, architectures and films, that are interpreted through the narrative as an opportunity to develop a hybrid architectural response.

The narrative is the device which addresses the parameters of interpretation, transformation and generation of an standard office located in the Tower 42, in the City of London. This narrative is a non-lineal structure consisting of a set of letters that Nora, a 25 years old basque woman, sends anonymously to her imprisoned father while she is living in secret in an empty office that was occupied by an advertisement company that went bankrupt during the economic turn down. Based on the secrecy that involves the narration, the letters are encode drawings, collages and images, in which Nora describes her mood and activities through the space she occupies, transforms and recreates in each letter.

This project deals with the contradiction between the increasing empty office space in the city center and the consequences of the lack of dwellings, the spread of the city boundaries. The fixed and impersonal architecture of offices is a clear reflection of the market logic. In a multinational capitalist society the architectural institutions (typologies) not always correspond with the cultural paradigm shift, the multicultural and fragmented framework of the so-called postmodernist culture. Aware of the role of architecture as a follower of social demands, this project aspires to define an hybrid spatial configuration based on a disinstitutionalised and recycled architecture.

The personal interests are addressed toward new spatial possibilities based on the concept of Architectures, in plural. Architectures of personal conditions in a multicultural society. A collage made of cultural references, a personal assemblage of a space made of fragments that create a unity based on the difference.
The potential of the narrative as architectural device for addressing personal stories toward spatial configurations, a mixture of art and language, are implemented here to blur the universal unity of modern architectural production and to suggest a new myriad of architectures that escape from binary oppositions and dichotomies. In these terms,it is a critical analysis against the conventional method of modern architecture thinking, linear and time-based.

To achieve this goals the project is addressed by means of a narrative made of different writings and cultural references. The plot is weaved by means of others writings. The project is developed through two narrative processes: the interpretative, of the structure, plot, characters and voice of the space and, the generative, through the opportunities that offer the text to materialise the space. The structure is based on Perec's "Life: a user's manual", where the subject of the narrative is the space which articulates all the parts, and on John Berger "From A to X" ,a plot based on letters without beginning nor end.The project does not follow a linear development, its order is partially left on the particular understanding of the reader who, as the fictitious prisoner, has to decode the space through the letters. In this metaphor the reader is a prisoner of cultural conventions, who is challenged to free the chains of linear thinking and grasp the ambiguous whole. The letters are a text in images that corresponds to a text of words. It manifests a reaction against the dominance of visual image and written language in western architecture, questioning the neutrality of both as the proper correspondence of the act of see and speak. The letters are made of different fragments as an effect caused by the collision between the narration and the space .The assemblage of fragments forces an abandonment of the idea of the reader as a passive receptor.
The space, in its original configuration, is de-constructed, fragmented and violated, converted in shreds that form a pile of pieces, a row material that the structure of the narrative gathers by means of allegorical interpretation, transformation and translation. A space to be recreated with each new reading, with each new assemblage.
The secrecy of the letters, the essence of the narrative, entails the choice of a method that can encode the text into images allowing after a decode of the images into the text. The methodology focuses on such conductors that can express simultaneously these uncertainties from the text to the image and vice-versa. According to this condition the project looks for symbolic and allegoric conductors. The symbolism of drawings and images, the emblems that mix letters and images, the mnemonic of places, objects and lyrics, and the allegory.

The Dynamic Construction of Identity of the character, Nora, as a Reflection on the Spatial Transformation

Starting from the consideration of post-modern identities, as dynamic, non static with regard to a multi-layered, non-Unitarian, fragmented, plural post-modern subjectivity, Nora, the character of the narration is going to life a process of negation, frustration, opening, learning, adaptation, offer and exchange.
In the narrative, based on letters, the character is going to face the dilemma of explain her experience to her father through the space she is dwelling. The time of the narrative is not determined so the speed of her change is neither deductible. The narrative takes into account the influence of the space and its surroundings, the office and the view of London at night, over her dynamic construction of identity.
This different steps are related to specific spatial conditions. The particular spatial interpretation is made by using the estates she experiences in the dynamic construction of her identity.
From the Basque woman who feels nostalgia, and seeks refuge in the her culture, refusing to open her mind to the different (the other) toward a Basque woman who feels herself part of the multicultural society where she takes and she gives and all subcultures are recognized.

These steps that are developed through the plot have not a defined order:

-alienation, strangeness, melancholy of the gone, her culture place and people.
-refuse, shutting herself in her background, living from the past, avoiding her new environment.
-frustration, and rage, impossibility of live from the past and avoiding “the other”.
-opening, start learning the “other”, facing the present.
-assimilation, of the “other” into “ours”.
-contribution, personal investment
-exchanging, giving and taking from the “ours”, multiculturalism

About Post-modern Identities with reflections on the Implications of a Multicultural World

The essay “Structuring of Modern an Post-modern Identities with reflections on the Pedagogical Implications Multicultural World” by Mariam John Meynert, University of Lund, is a starting point to assess the theories of the construction of the identity, that is going to be used to address the personal development of the character of the narrative.

The essay is “a theoretical attempt to de-constructt the notion of essentialized, stable, static and coherent modernist subjectivity/identity and tries to explore the construction of amulti-layeredd, nonUnitariann, fragmented, pluralpost-modernn subjectivity/identity...It tries to construct the representation of identities within a world-system paradigm..Post-modernity is seen as a condition of fragmentation due to capital flight, resulting in discontinuities between different forms of collective and individual life."

This deconstruction of modernist identity does not write of “the other”. "Writing the "other" is seen as violence, as it silence and disallow the other from representing themselves...This has resulted in a focus on research on self-definition, self-identification, autobiographical and local narratives and a replacements of flawed grand narratives". It involves the notion of “difference” as ideal.

"Post-modernism discourses challenge the fiction of the self-determining subject of modern discourses and the inflated conception of human reason and will. The notion of subjectivity is de-constructed and is considered non-Unitarian and multi-layered."

"The identity of a person is produced simultaneously in many different locales of activities by different agents for many different purposes. Identities are continually displaced and replaced. The subject is neither unified nor fixed."

Identity is also constructed through narratives – stories, sagas, histories and world views internalised into cognitive make-up of identity of a person. Narratives are crucial (Said, 1993), because they are the method through which people assert their own identity and an existence of their own history.

Eriksen (1993) describes three main strategies used by nation-states in dealing with minorities:
- The first one is Assimilation, a modernist strategy, where minorities loose their language and market and gradually come to identify themselves as the dominant people. - The second strategy is the domination, where segregation on ethic ground is implied, the creating of ghettos and slung.
- The third strategy is multiculturalism, a strategy close to post-modern perspective. “Here the members of all cultures and ethnicity enjoy full rights as citizens, without implying high degree of local autonomy. Multiculturalism may take two forms: that of melting strategy, where instead of the traditions of the immigrants being dissolved in favour of those dominant among the pre-existing population, traditions of all cultural groups blend to form a new, evolving cultural pattern. And cultural pluralism where it is foster the development of a genuinely plural society, in which the equal validity of numerous different subcultures are recognized.

About the Structure - About the letters

Before starting to develop the first letter (what just means the first letter that is going to be produced not having in any case the role of a beginning), it is necessary to explain what are these letters to the project, why they are what they are and how they are going to be made and how they can be read. This is one thing and the same than to explain the structure of the project.

- The letters draw the project. The subject of the encoded narration is the space. The descriptions, details and cluster of references that accompany the plot are related to the space

- The letters do not follow a linear development, its order is partially left on the particular understanding of the reader of the project. The reader, as the fictitious prisoner, has to decode the space through the letters. In this metaphor the reader is a prisoner of cultural conventions, who is challenged to free the chains of linear thinking to grasp the ambiguous whole.

- The letters are a text in images that corresponds to a text of words. It manifests a reaction against the dominance of visual image and written language in western architecture, questioning the neutrality of both, image and text as a proper correspondence of the act of see and the act of speak.

- The letters, are like “ruins”, in terms of Jennifer Bloomer for whom ruin “represents a construction in which temporality is a sluggish or slothful (lazy) operator, becoming, anachronized, petrified, and thereby legible as spatiality”

- The letters question the conventional method of architecture thinking and the project is presented as a critical analysis that is made of questions rather than hypothesis. This abandon of time to present a project as spatial is a response against the blind faith in the scientific-method,the proof versus the hypothesis, the linear thinking.

-The letters are made of different fragments. This fragments are an effect caused by the collision between the narration and the space .The assemblage of fragments forces an abandonment of the idea of the reader as a passive receptor.

- As a collage, the heterogeneous fragments of the collage occupy two different positions. One is the position that the fragment occupies in connection with its original context and the other is the position related to its role as a part of a new whole. This way the collage, the fragmented whole, oscillates between presence and absence and therefore it does not allow a linear and unique reading of the whole.

- As a puzzle, the logic of assembly of the reader recreates the space. A new reading supposes a new logic of assembly and therefore a different spatial construction. As Perec shows in “Life: a user's manual” the process that a puzzle-maker starts never comes to an end. The logic of the puzzle-maker is confronted in a different way for each new assemblage of the pieces.

- In the project both, the different assemblages of pieces of each letter, as well as, the different assemblage between letters, bring about different narratives that again can suggest new interpretation of the parts and the whole, enclosing a cycle.

-The space, in its original configuration, is de-constructed, fragmented and violated, converted in shreds that form a pile of pieces, a row material that the structure of the narrative gathers by means of allegorical interpretation, transformation and translation. A space to be recreated dynamically with each new reading, with each new assemblage.

- The letters have different writers, painters, film makers, architects, musicians and photographers. They all departure from the text and are interpreted by means of the idiosyncrasy and technique of their work.

- The secrecy of the letters, the essence of the narrative, entails the choice of a method that can encode the text into images allowing after a decode of the images into the text. For, in this process of creating text in images that corresponds to a text of words, the methodology cannot be based on a relationship between signifier and signified, it is not a translation that can be achieved directly because the dynamic shift of sensations, feeling, aspirations and fears that are reflected into the space are ambiguous and the correspondence has to be mediated.

- The methodology focuses on such conductors that can express simultaneously these uncertainties from the text to the image and vice-versa, a hermaphrodite condition that merges text and space. According to this condition the project looks for symbolic and allegoric conductors. The symbolism of drawings and images, the emblems that mix letters and images, the mnemonic of places, objects and lyrics, and the allegory (which complexity and importance in this project will be expose in another post).

Tracing the main plot - 01

The structure of the narrative that is going to address the project is based on the letters a prisoner is receiving. But behind these letter is hidden a narrative, which is going to be responsible for the spatial transformations. This plot has the role of "Bartlebooth's plan" plot in Perec's novel. So it is a plot which is related to the space, the proper subject of the letters.

The plot tries to gather three main features, that in the end, explain the inner logic of the project:

- Deal with an current and established architectural issue: empty offices and lack of dwellings
- Define the feeling of the characters related to their places: To be living illegally and in secret in an office as it would be a dwelling while sending letter to her imprisoned father
- Explain the symbolic and allegoric secret language: that a daughter can use to encode the the drawn letters, by using cultural productions, how she is doing through how is her place.


Here is the Summary of the Plot:

After her father arrest, Nora, a 24 years old Basque girl who has just finished her degree in Art and Literature in Bilbao, escapes to London. Her father, a 58 years old editor of a Basque magazine of Arts and Politics, is under protective custody in Nanclares Prison, because the magazine he works for has been accused of illegal activities. All the staff and writers are suspicious until the trial, and Nora wrote some articles the last year so she is going to be asked to testify.
She flies to London and the first day she finds a job cleaning an office in the Tower 42 of the City of London. Among the 1 million sq m of empty office space of the City of London, this empty office was occupied by an advertisement company which went bankrupt during the economic turn-down. She has to throw the remained stuff away, clean and tidy the office to be rented again. She has very few money and she does not know anybody so she decided to life in secret in the office for a while. She eats from vending machines, use the toilet and sleep in a reception sofa. She decided to sent some letter to her father to tell him how she is doing. She cannot put her name in them, so due to his father relation to artists, she decides to draw the letters and tell about her life reflecting her place and activities encoded through them. At the same time, she reflects in this letters her mood, uncertainties and aspirations in a dynamic construction of her identity. The office is used as a dwelling but as well as his father she cannot leave the place. All her contact with the exterior world is the view of London at night, from 5 pm to 8 am.

Expression for Spatial Narrative_2

Following with this search of art production that can suggest me a possible expressions for spatial narrative, I put as another example the work of the American artist Robert Rauschenberg.

His paintings are more abstract that those of Salle, being a funny depiction of abstract expressionist that take into account mass culture. Before the boom of the Pop Art in the 60´s his three dimensional painting are very innovative of how space and painting can be related. After the 60's his works started to be bi dimensional and the use of collage, images and abstract background suggest me a way of depicting space, with the abstraction of half light to express deepness and the figuration of object that are shown in the foreground.

"He found his signature mode by embracing materials traditionally outside of the artist’s reach. He would cover a canvas with house paint, or ink the wheel of a car and run it over paper to create a drawing, while demonstrating rigor and concern for formal painting... The idea of combining and of noticing combinations of objects and images has remained at the core of Rauschenberg’s work. As Pop Art emerged in the ’60s, Rauschenberg turned away from three-dimensional combines and began to work in two dimensions, using magazine photographs of current events to create silk-screen prints" From http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters

Expression for Spatial Narrative_1

In these set of post that I begin with this first example, I am going to gather some artistic productions that I consider very suggestive of how the space can be expressed through narrative.

I start with the work of the neo figurative painter David Salle. His paintings gather images and icons of the culture, where mass culture and elite cultural product share the same space of the canvas. The figurative is mixed with the abstraction of the backgrounds. They also mix tradition with current topics. These paintings are a interference of a myriad of expressions that I find very interesting as a way to express the space through a narrative based on space and not on time. I consider or interpret his paintings as unfinished tales that allow you to fill the gaps with your imagination.

I enclose the examples of David Salle painting (above), with some descriptions of Fredic Jameson in "Postmodernism- or the cultural logic of the late capitalism" related to this kind of painting and the work of Salle particularly.

"(his description of this kind of painting)Surrealism without the Unconscious...in which the most uncontrolled kinds of figuration emerge with the depthlessness that is not even hallucinatory, like the free associations of an impersonal collective subject, without the personal unconscious neither of a group one"

"(David Salle) His archetypal category (for it is not a form, exactly) seems to be the empty organization of the dyptich or double panel, where, however, the content that traditionally accompanied such gesture - authentification and de authentification, unmasking, the puncturing of one sign system in the name of another, or of reality itself - remain absent"